USA
Testimony continued Tuesday against former Enron Corp. CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. On Monday, jurors heard final testimony from Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer and a key witness against the two disgraced executives. Fastow, who has admitted to stealing millions from Enron, has arranged with prosecutors to serve 10 years in prison in return for his testimony.
Low retail sales figures for February drove stock futures down Tuesday. A Commerce Department report showed a 1.3 percent dip in retail sales, but sales figures outside the automotive industry dropped only 0.4 percent - a decline analysts had anticipated. A separate Commerce report showed a record-setting current account deficit of $804.9 billion for 2005. The deficit, which measures trade in goods and services as well as investments, was the largest ever both in terms of sheer numbers and its share of the US economy.
New questions about the reliability of the College Board, the company that owns and administers the SAT exam for college applicants, arose Tuesday. The company reported potential problems with 1,600 tests taken in October. The revelation follows last week's news of scoring errors on some 4,000 exams.
A resolution by Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin to censure President Bush for allowing warrantless eavesdropping of US citizens was headed to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Feingold's proposal is expected to be a largely symbolic protest.
Internet news magazine Salon.com is challenging the identity of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner whose image has become symbolic of the prison's abuse scandal. The New York Times had identified the man as Ali Shalal Qaissi in a Page 1 profile published Saturday. Salon.com's objections are based on interviews with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command and its own scrutiny of 280 Abu Ghraib photos. Times officials, who say they are investigating, believed Qaissi's claims on the basis of evidence from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Qaissi's lawyers.
